#otherworlds

The most readily observable quality about the myrkr wood is that it is always presented as a boundary between two lands or worlds. Beyond this border lies the unknown, dangerous and/or supernatural.

The old stories, old mysteries, old sacraments, however important—indeed, of whatever central importance—can serve only to wither and blacken the souls of human beings. If horror offers an alternate sacrament, it can only negate meaning in any form we might be willing to acknowledge. The paradox of these alternate worlds finally is of a nullity expressed so vividly that it constitutes an authentic reality of its own.

Concerning this alternate world, Blackwood has few doubts; his clarity of description in turn sheds light on the invocation of these worlds by others. It is “a place unpolluted by men,” that is, both inhuman and unhuman, “a ‘beyond region’ … another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human.” A “veil” separates this place from our more familiar regions, a veil usually opaque but sometimes diaphanous, one that can occasionally be penetrated (or seen through) in either direction (184).

Alienation and an increasing feeling of horror go hand in hand, “the feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet.” They become aware of having crossed some crucial boundary. One camper says to the other: “There are things about us, I’m sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction. … We’ve strayed out of a single safe line somewhere” (183).

Loss of color, loss of fixed shapes and familiar forms, endless and indeterminate movement—all these qualities and more identify “a region of singular loneliness and desolation.” Later descriptions only reinforce these initial details; we are told of the disappearance of “human habitation and civilization … the sense of remoteness from the world of human kind, the utter isolation.” It is, in fact, “a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic” (154). But the wonders are awful, the magic is black.

[…] so much for the redemptive power of time. As [Ackroyd] puts it: “Time is a vast Denful of Horrour, round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites itself by the Tail […] Who can speak of the mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?” […] In Hawksmoor Ackroyd’s serpent not only denies the secular and transcendent power of time but metaphorically (if not by some actual demonic presence) marks out the mazes that constitute those central places of horror, those “thin and transparent,” scarcely veiled places that we cross into or that otherwise may intrude on our commonplace experience.